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| Baltimore rat exterminator Harold Edmond in Rat Film |
Two recent indie movies illustrate this very well and in very different ways: Step (A Sundance award winner) and Rat Film. Both are documentaries made by Baltimore native directors, and both are placed in the "other" Baltimore which tourists normally don't get to see. Aside from the common location, the films are as different as possible. The one follows a straight story path into well known movie making-patterns which usually end happily. The other is a sequence of often dark, sometimes vaguely funny dioramas that are only loosely connected often by not much else than their Baltimore locus. "Like its star critters, the movie scurries through the underbelly of its city on an unpredictable path, zigging where one might expect it to zag", the New York Times syas about the film. The one film is an uplifting reminder that persistence can prevail against all odds, the other juxtaposes dystopia and dysfunction with a spirit of pragmatic survival highlighting uncanny and somewhat frightening similarities between humans and rats.
Equal parts disturbing and humorous, informative and bizarre, “Rat Film” is a brilliantly imaginative and formally experimental essay on how Baltimore has dealt with its rat problem and manipulated its black population.(NYT Movie Review)Either way, it is an elating experience to see these movies on the big screen and how the gauge Baltimore not just as a backdrop (such as in Sleepless in Seattle) or tell the epic Baltimore history from the white immigrant perspective such as Barry Levinson's Baltimore trilogy or from John Water's own panopticon of characters. Nor do the new films serve up the crime based narratives of Homicide and the Wire. Step and Rat Film move on to the nagging questions of opportunity, equity and the history of oppression. As its famous predecessors the films pays homage to the life of everyday residents and their survival and philosophies, teaching at the same time a lot about education, urban planning, research and the subtle and not so subtle means of infusing these fields with white supremacy. The Baltimore SUN was so excited by Step that the paper believes the film will change how the world sees Baltimore.
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| Step Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women |
“Every American city has problems. But it's important that — yes, acknowledge the problems, we are honest about the problems. But also tell the other side of it, the other stories, the stories of hope and joy.” (”Sandra Lipitz)
This documentary has a classic twinned narrative: The girls must get into college (that’s the school’s main goal), and there’s a big step competition coming up. “Step” manages to tell both stories in under 90 minutes, with a city rived by the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody as its fraught backdrop. (NYT)
Step: How Tayla Solomon succeeds
As we get to known the girls and their families, Ms. Lipitz upends stereotypes — about Baltimore, single mothers and young black girls in urban communities. Little is sentimental or sugarcoated; Ms. Lipitz is interested in nuance. (NYT Movie Review)When, due to water problems, school had to let out early twice in the first week after the summer break, it wasn't just any school, but the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women now famous from the movie which it carries prominently on its website. Wherever the girls from the Leadership School go after stepping out into the street in their pleated plead skirts, they are no longer just another group of middle-schoolers, but they are the determined young women from Baltimore who won the multi-state step competition.
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| Praise for the Rat Film |
Movies and novels are just a few of the methods on how new frontiers are explored and new territory is settled. Giving Baltimore City rat exterminator Harold Edmond the role of main protagonist in Rat Film, director Theo Anthony gives a powerful voice to one of the many who usually don't have one. What the audience gets to hear is a panorama of thoughtful, even philosophical observations processed by someone who has served Baltimore's under-served communities for 17 years. The media all quote his most memorable sentence: "Ain't never been a rat problem in Baltimore; it's always been a people problem," but Edmond is sympathetic to his customers and, curiously, also to the rats he sets out to eradicate. He locates the rats "where people have no education, no aspirations and no hope and just live day to day" as he muses behind the wheel of his beat up city truck.
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| Harold Edmond and film director Theo Anthony discuss the Rat Film at the Parkway Saturday |
Theo Anthony"s audience will also see Baltimore differently. The film shows Charm City from the street, as a crude model in a video game, from the air and from the view of those living inside its walls. In a drastic move the film director has his Baltimore blown up as part of the 4th of July celebrations. "The people agreed surprisingly easily" the entirely unemotional off screen narrator dryly states at the end of his film. The voice states that a a new city was created and that the residents named it New Baltimore. The film suggests without explicitly saying so that the new city wouldn't come out all that different from the old one, not because of Baltimore per-se but presumably because of the laws of the bigger universe in which the rats and humans exist; yet the end leaves hope that there may be some improvement. That hope is established right in the beginning when we learn "A rat can jump 32". A Baltimore trashcan is 34". That is when the viewer begins to root for the rat and hopes that in the end it manages the leap, although this final extra high leap into freedom in which Americans intrinsically believe, remains only suggested in the film, reinforced by the repetition of the scene near the end but less certain than the fate of the baby rat, which is devoured alive by a snake recorded by a merciless camera.
The two new Baltimore movies make the unlikely leap their underlying theme. To leap high enough for a a quantum change in opportunity. An inspiration for the city in which the movies play to leap to the occasion and finally doing right by their residents by creating equity and opening up access.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
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| Baltimore as a video game model in Rat Film |
City Paper: Rat Film
Baltimore Magazine: Rat Film
New York Times Movie Review: Rat Film
NPR review: Rat Film
New York Times Movie Review: STEP
STEP currently plays at the Charles Theatre, RAT FILM at the Parkway Theatre.
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